Franklin Schargel’s Blog

My latest blog for the Huffington Post has just been posted.  It title appears above.  If you would like to read it, go to

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/waiting-for-superman-does_b_837908.html.

I have seen the film and believe, as I state in the blog that it has identified educators and teacher unions as the enemy and charter schools as the ultimate solution.

Scapegoating Educators

Franklin Schargel

Hunting season has begun and educators are the targets.

The governors of Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey, and Ohio and now the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island have determined that educators and public education make highly visible, easy to attack victims.  They are attempting to balance their budgets on the backs of public servants.  But not all “public servants” only those who are “not essential.”  Essential services like the police, firemen, public hospital and sanitation workers have been exempted from the cuts.

Educators did not cause this problem.  But it is easier to target educators rather than the financial, insurance and banking industries that did.

Education, in most states, is a major component in the makeup of state and local budgets.  Many states spend close to 50% of their budget on schools.  But politicians tell their constituents that education is expensive.  Ignorance is far more expensive.  Estimates of the percentage of prisoners who are school dropouts range as high as 82 percent.  Prisons cost taxpayers more than $32 billion a year. Every year that an inmate spends in prison costs $22,000. An individual sentenced to five years for a $300 theft costs the public more than $100,000. The cost of a life term averages $1.5 million. Some states are spending more money on prisons than education. Over the course of the last 20 years, the amount of money spent on prisons was increased by 570% while that spent on elementary and secondary education was increased by only 33%. No school district in the country spends that much on education.

Education affects a lot of people, not just educators.  It affects parents, businesses, as well as law enforcement.  But more importantly, it affects our future and our global competitiveness. Wisconsin Democrat Representative Tamara Grigsby said, ” Governor Walker’s budget represented an absolute annihilation of education in the state”.  It was not long ago that the president, businesspeople and state governors who were decrying the fact that our schools were not “globally competitive”.  But since children don’t vote, they are easy targets.

Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, is cutting small business taxes while trying to reduce essential spending and threatening to prevent public employees from striking. The state has a budgetary shortfall of $3 billion over the past two years (Wisconsin budgets biennially). But Walker campaigned on creating a business-friendly climate, and called a special legislative session to enact his plans.

Walker won legislative approval for the centerpiece of his tax cut plan, a supermajority requirement for sales or income tax rate increases. The new law does not prevent property tax rate increases or other tax adjustments.

Walker promised tax cuts for businesses on the campaign trail and introduced the bill as part of his jobs-creation agenda. He hasn’t said how he plans to make up the lost revenue, and Democrats have blasted the cuts as too insignificant to stimulate job creation.

The media is comparing public and private sector employee salaries but is failing (in most cases) to recognize that public employees have college degrees.  According to Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, “Forty-eight percent of government employees have college degree compared to 23 percent in the private sector.  Teachers, social workers, public lawyers all are required to have at least 4 years of college.”  According to Dr. Reich, “comparing apples to apples and you’d see that over the last 15 years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education.  Public sector workers earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector”.

The Green Bay Packers are reportedly planning to ask local voters to approve extension of a special additional 0.5 percent sales tax, worth $19 million annually, to fund their purchase and redevelopment of land around Lambeau Field. Public policy experts oppose the extension, arguing that sales tax revenue can be put to better use, like public education and transportation funding.

In his effort to encourage business growth in the state, Governor Walker has proposed eliminating state capital gains taxes without identifying how to make up for those tax eliminations.

Legislators state that state budget imbalances have been caused by unfunded retiree health coverage liabilities and pensions.  But these underfunded programs have been well known over a period of time and little or nothing has been done to adjust the funding.

Governor Walker has conspicuously exempted police and firefighters ““ both unions backed his campaign last year.  While the governor is demanding savings from state employees and the low-income citizens who rely on public services, he is also advocating a cut in corporate taxes, which will increase the state’s deficit and proposing no-bid sales of government assets.

Compare what is happening in Wisconsin, Ohio and New Jersey with what is happing in Nebraska. Republican Governor Dave Heinemann has proposed a $16.5 million initiative aimed at attracting jobs while saying he will not raise taxes.  He is aware that his state must spend money on education and job programs in order to attract economic development.

Governor Walker contends that bargaining rights for public employees has caused state deficits to dramatically increase.  But states that deny employees bargaining rights like Nevada, North Carolina are running deficits of over 30 percent.

Something is wrong with the picture in Wisconsin, by attacking those most vulnerable and those least responsible for the state financial crisis may make sense to the governor but makes little sense to too many.

If you enjoyed this article, it appears on the Huffington Post. I will be writing for them.  You can visit their website.  I also appear on YouTube.

A new report from the Internet security firm AVG indicates that more small children can play a computer game than ride a bike. The Digital Diaries study  said that 58 percent of children aged two to five know how to play a “basic computer game” compared with 52 percent who know how to ride a bike. Sixty-three percent can turn a computer on and off, and 69 percent can use a mouse. By contrast, only 20 percent can “swim unaided,” 11 percent can tie their shoelaces without help, and 20 percent know how to make an emergency phone call.

The study was conducted by contacting 2,200 online mothers of children between two and five years old in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

What are the implications of this survey?  Children today need both skills – life and technology.  While it is great that they know how to work a computer or play video games, they also need “people” skills – the skills they need to deal with people and not with machines.

Read more: https://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-20029002-238.html#ixzz1Bby0kyLf

In addition to reading about education on this website, Franklin is now a Huffington Post blogger @ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/scapegoating-educators_b_831875.html

So those of you who are interested can read Franklin’s work at the Huffington Post site as well as on Youtube.

Teacher unions are under attack from several sources.  Republicans in several states have proposed legislation that would bar teacher unions  from all policy decisions except negotiating compensation.  In Tennessee and Wisconsin, Republicans have proposed removing teacher collective bargaining rights.

With the issuance of “Waiting for Superman” in DVD more people will see the film which depicts teacher unions as the enemy and that charter schools are the ultimate answer to all that ails education today.  There are excellent charter schools and not so excellent charter schools.  Just as there are excellent public schools and not so excellent public schools.  Not once in the film do the producers show successful public schools.  But they do state, that only 1 in 5 charter schools is performing at a high level.

If teacher unions were the problem of low performance, then states without teacher unions like Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi would be the highest performing states in the United States – and we know that they aren’t.

Teacher tenure at the university level means life-long employment.  In the K-12 system it simply means due process.

Teacher unions do not hire incompetent teachers – administrators do.  The same administrators have three years to get rid of poorly performing, non-tenured teachers.  If anyone should be blamed for having poor teachers, it should be school administrators.

Teacher unions are a highly visible force in education.  And while I do not agree with all that they do, they do perform some vital functions.  The conservative Republicans and even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Obama Administration has found a high profile “enemy”.  I wish they would pursue the bank, insurance and financial industries, which brought our nation to our knees, as hard as they do the teacher unions.

My friend Steve Brant wrote an article in response to a NY Times article dealing with schools.  Steve has given me permission to publish it. Steve writes for the Huffington Post as well.

I agree that an education is not simply a matter of a bunch of separately measurable, mechanical skills (“reading, writing, ‘rithmetic”) and that students should be forced to learn using fear of bad grades as the motivator.

That “assembly line thinking” (which was actually portrayed in the film “Waiting for ‘Superman”) approach to teaching is obsolete. It does nothing to fire the creative, imaginative minds of students!

The creation of minds that love to learn and love to use their creative capacity to combine ideas in new and imaginative ways is what should be driving America’s educational improvement efforts. “Teaching to the test” is a recipe for a failed educational system. It may make some people feel good, because it lets us “blame someone” (usually teachers) when students don’t do well. But what we really should be doing is “blaming” the design of the educational system…. a design which is obsolete and has been for a long time… for our troubles.

The education system in America needs to be redesigned in such a way that it eliminates fear-based, mechanical (assembly line) teaching and replaces that process with aspiration-based learning in which students get to help direct their own learning process.

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Steven G. Brant

Founder and Principal

Trimtab Management Systems

[email protected]

Skype:  stevengbrant

https://www.trimtabmanagementsystems.com

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-g-brant

https://www.facebook.com/stevengbrant

https://www.twitter.com/stevebrant

https://bit.ly/1cA8YD (memorial essay to Russ Ackoff)

According to a National Institutes of Health study, for each dollar spent on federally funded Child Parent Centers, there was a $4-$11 return.  Because children performed better and were less likely to be held back, arrested, depressed or involved with drugs or took ill.

Because of the shortsightedness of politicians and the short time horizon of the business community, we make large cuts in education without considering the impact on the future of the country or the economy.  People who believe that education is expensive are wrong.  Education is a one-time expense.  It is ignorance which is expensive.